Tag: neworleans

Around the Podosphere

Here’s a few things that have struck me as interesting from my recent listening.

I’m a fan of Harry Shearer’s Le Show and the July 20th episode featured a lot of talk with John M. Barry, a writer and expert on New Orleanian issues. I liked how Mr. Barry debunked the whole ridiculous “why rebuild a city under sea level?” meme quite well. If you are at all interested in New Orleans, the failure of the federal levees and related topics, I recommend this for a listen.

I continue to be interested in minicomics. I’ll be honest, most of my inspiration and excitement that I get from DIY media lately has come from the minicomics community. I really want to find a place where I can send them some dough and they’ll send me a grab bag of mixed stuff. I’m interested in the medium but the search costs are high. I do love when I can get a nice compact burst of information on the topic, which I did get from this Dollar Bin recording of the minicomics panel from HeroesCon. This panel had a lot of Alec Longstreth in it. This does make me realize that I need to go to Lulu.com and buy the collection of his minicomics.

I like listening to SModcast and I don’t begrudge the boys making some money, particularly when they are paying a dude to edit and lay in their music bed. Considering the music bed is really the third guy on the show, it’s a significant part of the program. However, their Think Geek sponsorship on the show I listened to today was painful. It was goofy and all and in the kind of style I like to do mine, but damn it felt like it went on forever. I checked the MP3 player and it was a little under 3 minutes but it felt like 10. I’d suggest after about a minute, y’all stop. Past that, you subtract value and make me pissed off at Think Geek. I’m just saying.

Poppy Brite on New Orleans +5 months

Poppy Z. Brite lets rip a little of how she feels on the 5 month anniversary of Katrina landfall.

Of course I am mad as hell: at the Army Corps of Engineers who lied to us, at the White House and Congress who want our resources but don’t want to pay for them, at our local and state politicians and FEMA who left us to die, at other Americans who make cracks about the stupidity of living in a flood zone as they burn oil processed here and suck up the bounty of our waters and ports.

I loved her two newest novels, Liquor and Prime both of which are set in the New Orleans restaurant world.

Small Favor

Poppy checks in so that at least her friends and acquaintances all know she and Chris are in Mississippi, safe if not sound. They are without power, but things there are not as dire as at their actual home. Although they are both alive, their animals are almost certainly dead or soon to be.

You know, she just finished a novel last week and I was going to email her this weekend to see if she would do an interview for the podcast. I had been holding off until she was past the final push, waiting for a calm time that will now not come soon, if it ever comes. They are effectively ruined. This would be a much worse story had they decided to wait it out in their home, but it surely sucks as it is.

She signs off asking people to pray for them. I’ll do my nearest equivalent, perhaps the sort of thing Hazel Motes might have been able to work up. This is grim shit, because this is one of the happy stories.

Update: Holy crap, rescue teams actually saved some of the pets!